Playing the percentages

Playing the percentages

One only needs to look at the current state of our country’s economy to realize why UVA employees should remain under their state classified staff status rather than switching to the University’s private plan [“Staff ponders HR plan choice,” UVA News, October 7, 2008]. Imagine where employees retiring right now under the new plan would be. If they remain a classified staff employee, they keep their rock solid Virginia Retirement System (VRS) defined benefit retirement plan, which is not negatively affected by the economy and/or stock market. UVA wants employees to switch to their new plan because they will only contribute 4 percent of employee’s salaries to their retirement plan. Under VRS they must contribute at least 8 percent.

This is only one tiny piece of the new plan that negatively affects UVA’s staff employees. Many other apparent and hidden negatives lie beneath the University’s hype.

Dena Bowers
Albemarle County

Editor’s note: UVA Human Resources responds to Bowers’ claims as follows: The figures the reader cites are incorrect. There is a “member” contribution and an “employer” contribution, but UVA makes the total contribution for both member and employer. UVA puts 5 percent of an employee’s salary in the employee’s member contribution account in his/her name. UVA also makes a contribution to an employer pool account that is based on a rate established every two years by VRS and approved by the General Assembly. That number varies from year to year based on the performance of the fund and other factors; in this past year, it was 11.23 percent.

Furthermore, there is no direct correlation between the employer contribution and the employee’s retirement. An employee’s retirement in VRS, which is known as a defined benefit or guaranteed annuity plan, is determined by a formula, and is not based on the accumulated contributions in the account. The formula is based on an employee’s age, years of service, and salary at highest-paid consecutive 36 months.

The Optional Retirement Plan is a defined contribution plan in which retirement benefits are based on contributions and earnings on your account balances over the course of your working years, at varying rates of interest depending on your portfolio. Again, the institution makes the total contribution for you. Each pay period UVA contributes 10.4 percent of an employee’s pay into an account on his/her behalf with the provider they selected.

The reader may have our Optional Retirement Plan confused with the Medical Center’s, which does contribute 4 percent into their employees’ accounts.

Six points of light

As we prepare for this great historical election we as Americans should realize that the only selections are Barack Obama for president and Joe Biden for vice president. The Obama team will do the following.

1. Put our economy back on track.

2. Bring all people together.

3. Remember our children’s education.

4. President Obama will also raise the fuel standards for our cars and trucks.

5. He will not forget the poor and needy.

6. He, President Obama, will always stand up for justice and equality for all people regardless of race, creed, color or gender.

The Republicans have hurt the American people; the last eight years have been so bad for all of us as a people. I want to note that America is sick and in dire need of a doctor due to the policies of the Republican Party.

We must move forward with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I feel that we will have many difficult days due to this present administration but, as Democrats, we should fight the fight of making what America should be for all of our people.

I feel also that the Obama team will also work on these racial problems that exist partly because of the Republicans (uncaringness) and their turning their backs on this problem.

We should also realize that we will need Tom Perriello for Congress [“Can he go the distance?” October 7, 2008], for he is in tune with the needs of America and Virginia. We should understand that Mark Warner is the only selection for the US Senate, and that he will make a difference for us as Virginians and as Americans.So I say to you today, support Perriello and support Warner. Together they all will help make America what it should be.

For the past three years, I have pictured you out there, The Reader, and written these weekly letters to you (this being the last one, I promise), even though I know they can’t possibly get through, since you aren’t you at all, but many, many people going about the business of life in this

It’s kind of a cliché that any media person who comes to town has his eyes fixed on the Rotunda and the Mountain first. Apart from the novelty and force of Jefferson’s attraction, there’s the instinct that you’ve got to understand how Monticello and the University work before you get the rest

This job brought me to town. I remember the process of circulating my resume three years ago, starting in early spring, a good time for changes, and winding up in an hour-long phone conversation with Frank Dubec, C-VILLE’s publisher at the time. It’s a six-hour drive from North Carolina’s

I first encountered the om prayer in the pages of Rudyard Kipling’s British Colonial picaresque novel, Kim, in which the protagonist teams up with a wise and seemingly guileless Tibetan monk to foil Russian gun runners in the Khyber Pass. Apart from being a writer with Dickens’ touch in

I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public […]

What does an artist need? A clean, well-lit place? Genius? A tortured soul? Or is the answer less poetic? Cheap rent, time to spare, and a bit of pocket money. Does an artist need theory, training, and genius underneath it all? Or will his art spring like a geyser from the darkest, deepest

You might have noticed there’s a little tag on the front of our newspaper commemorating 25 years in business. Our company started in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War and the dawning of the age of global capital and ethnic conflict. Cultural barriers,

When we publish our food listings magazine, Bites + Sites, the restaurant categories are always a bit of a conundrum. What do you do with a Russian-Turkish bakery or a French-owned restaurant that serves Virginia food or an Algerian-Mediterranean fusion joint or a Nepali-Indian place? When I

One of my friends in town told me a while ago that he always liked what I wrote, but he wondered why I was not feared as an editor. I told him I was not sure, but that maybe it was because I was more interested in building the framework for conversations than expressing my […]

I’ve been asked many times why I got a divinity degree, and there isn’t a simple answer. When I think about the enduring weight of student loans and the concrete impact it’s had on my professional life (virtually none), I begin to wonder myself. But that kind of hindsight sells short my own

Every journalist gets into the business because he likes answering questions of one kind or another. Who’s moving the money behind the scenes? What color was the getaway car? When was the last time the budget was short? Where, exactly, does the water end up? Good reporters answer a lot of

In 1965 Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, destroying the unimpeachable authority of The Big Three and American manufacturing by tugging on a loose strand, the accident statistics of the Chevrolet Corvair. Nader became the voice of the American middle class and rode a wave of consumer

Widely interpreted as a metaphor for J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal experience during World War I and afterwards, The Hobbit was originally published in 1937 with the alternative title There and Back Again. A comfortable bourgeois man is vacuumed out of his house into a global struggle between good

A perilous predicament: As we worry that our written language is being degraded by fractured modes of digital communication, there has never been a time when more people thought of themselves as writers. Journalism schools and MFA programs are full to the gills; self-publishing tools have made

Gabe Silverman died over the weekend. If you never met him, it’s your loss, but if you hung around the Downtown Mall much, you probably did. He was a real estate developer, I guess you could say, but he never dressed like one. Sometimes he looked like a super, puttering around in his green

When I stepped outside Saturday morning, buzzards were roosting in a bare tree at the back of the yard. The plants had frozen during the week and, taken together, the natural signals set off a kind of frenzy in me. I harvested the carrots and whatever else was left growing and trimmed the

The more I think about Tip O’Neill’s old adage “All politics is local,” the less it makes sense. When I first heard it in the ’80s, it sounded spot on. People care about their wallets and their backyards, and when they vote, they express those local priorities. But consider the negative space

I’m not worried about the government shutdown or the debt ceiling crisis. Neither, apparently, is Wall Street. I feel totally disconnected from the theater of the absurd on Capitol Hill. It’s funny to think that the first home I lived in was blocks away from the Capitol and that my father

I remember reading a think piece somewhere (probably in The Stone blog) that talked about the correlation between musical training and academic achievement in school aged children. In the comments stream, a guy had written from France to say how “American” the story was. The intrinsic value of

I am ashamed of my country’s memory. I get it. We were born into collective amnesia—so focused on making the future bright and so afraid of falling back if we looked over our shoulders that the stories we ended up telling were not so much lessons of the past as inoculations from it. No sense